LL.M. Arbitration and Dispute Resolution
Speaker: Prof. Peer Zumbansen, Faculty of Law, McGill University
Date: 29 May 2025
Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Venue: 11/F, Academic Conference Room, Cheng Yu Tung Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
For Registration, please click here.
About the Speaker:
Peer Zumbansen holds the inaugural Professorship of Business Law at McGill’s Faculty of Law and is the Academic Lead of the CIBC Office of Sustainable Finance under McGill University’s Sustainable Growth Initiative (SGI). Educated in Germany, France and the U.S. and admitted to the German bar, Zumbansen has held numerous visiting appointments, including at Yale Law School, the University of Michigan, Melbourne Law School, UCD Dublin, Tilburg Law School, the Université de Paris Dauphine, and others. A founder and long-time co-editor-in-chief of www.germanlawjournal.com, he launched the SSRN e-journal for the Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy Network (CLPE) at Osgoode Hall Law School. At King’s College London, Peer served as the inaugural Director of the Dickson Poon Transnational Law Institute from 2014-2020 and launched the “TLI Think! Papers SSRN series. At McGill, he launched the ‘Business Law Platform’ and the ‘Business Law Meter’ blog and is the founder and co-editor in chief of the McGill SGI Research Papers Series in Business, Finance, Law and Society with SSRN. In 2023 he launched the annual McGill MLP SGI Transformative Business Law Summer Academy (TBLSA), an interdisciplinary policy writing institute in Montréal, co-taught in collaboration with colleagues across Canada, the U.S. and abroad. Recent publications: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=109516
About the Lecture:
While courses on “Climate Change Law” [CCL] are slowly featuring more frequently in law school curricula, they are still far from ‘business as usual.’ This project takes its cues from the history of political ideas and from recently recurring arguments that scrutinize the role of law in sustaining and perpetrating conditions of structural discrimination and exclusion, sub verbo ‘LPE’. By interrogating CCL as a complex and composite legal field, shaped by public and private law framings, by domestic, inter- and transnational challenges to jurisdiction and territoriality, and – crucially – by longstanding struggles over land, resources, access and working conditions, CCL emerges as a precarious and decidedly political project. The presentation will trace CCL’s ideational and constantly contested presumptions – “Climate change mitigation is a public regulatory responsibility”; “Governmental climate-related interventions, for example in the form of mandatory disclosure rules, the introduction of carbon taxes or tightened corporate directors’ duties, place an inordinate weight on private business”; “Climate change mitigation is about the environment, while human rights are a separate domain” – and challenge their blind-spots, omissions and exclusions. The insistence on climate change law as a key concern for continuing curriculum development can foster broader course innovation, cross-university initiatives and new avenues for climate law clinics and related experiential learning projects beyond the mere introduction of a said elective course on the subject.
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